High Pore Volume Silica from Sodium Silicate

High pore volume silica materials have attracted growing interest for their increasing applications in various fields such as catalyst carrier, coating additive, adsorbent, etc. It is interesting to both industry and academy for its progress in how large pore volume silica material can be produced and what kinds of approaches have been applied. For this purpose, this review intends to summarize the recent progress about the preparations and applications of high pore volume silica materials using sodium silicate as the main silicon precursor. For support, some basic concepts, including the pores, the chemistry of forming large pore volume, and classification of high pore volume material, are introduced. For prospective development, silica materials with relatively large pore volume and large surface area with good mechanical property including hierarchical porous silica should be desirable.